


when white moths were on the wing

by falterth



Series: because a fire was in my head [1]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Hinata Receives the Caged Bird Seal, Hyuuga Branch House, POV Hyuuga Hinata, didn't you get the memo? hiashi's an asshole, mentions of parental abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-06
Updated: 2018-11-06
Packaged: 2019-08-19 15:42:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16537463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/falterth/pseuds/falterth
Summary: Hinata receives the Caged Bird seal exactly one week after she graduates from the academy.





	when white moths were on the wing

**Author's Note:**

> this fic is the prelude to another, longer fic detailing hinata's new life as a branch member and how her relationships with neji, hanabi, and the rest of the konoha twelve and their teachers change and grow. it is to be titled "and moth-like stars were flickering out." the titles of the series, this fic, and the next fic are all taken from my favorite poem, [The Song of Wandering Aengus](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55687/the-song-of-wandering-aengus) by w.b. yeats.
> 
> warnings: mentions of parental abuse. i feel like it isn't quite classified as "graphic depictions of violence" since there's no bloodshed, but hinata goes through a LOT of pain when the cursed seal is activated for the first time and i describe it in detail.

Hinata receives the Caged Bird seal exactly one week after she graduates from the academy. There’s no question about it: she’s never going to become the head of the clan now. She stares up at the sky while two Hyūga elders press her shoulders into a stone slab and a third paints her forehead with the cursed seal. Huge fluffy clouds blow past, far above her reach, and Hinata blinks. The cool sweep of the brush against her forehead does nothing to reassure her. It will hurt. Hiashi-sama—not father, not anymore—had told her it would likely be the greatest pain she would ever experience.

 _Why?_ she wonders absently. The third elder, Heihachiro-sama, dips his brush in the pot of green ink again and goes in for another brushstroke. _What about the injuries I will receive as a jōnin? What if I am captured and tortured?_

Maybe Hiashi wants her to retire and have children before her career as a shinobi takes off. Even if she’s a Branch House member now she’s still got the genes of the head of the clan. Hinata finds the thought sickening. The elders adjust their grip on her shoulders. Her back is cold against the stone slab and she wonders if the pain will be so bad that they must hold her down while she thrashes. She’s in ceremonial robes, the kind one wears for an important birthday or a meeting between clans. This doesn’t feel like something to be celebrated—it feels like a sacrifice.

“It is done. I will activate the seal,” Heihachiro-sama announces. He looks down at her, then, with a mixture of pity and disdain on his face. Hinata’s a timid girl, afraid to act out against her elders, but right now she wants to bare her teeth and growl. Nobody did this to her. She failed to live up to her father’s explanations. It’s on her. It’s _her_ fault. She doesn’t need someone to look down on her for something she did to herself. Hinata wants to snarl but she’s a good girl and good girls don’t snarl so she stays quiet and unmoving. Heihachiro-sama gives her one last look. “Maybe things could have been different. It’s a pity.”

Hinata swallows hard. She is a good Hyūga. She will accept the Caged Bird seal and move on with her life and maybe she won’t be as strong as she could have been, not with this thing eating away at her Byakugan, keeping her on a tight leash, but she will try. In a way, being a member of the Branch House gives her a little more freedom.

She’ll never be able to escape from everything—she’s growing surer by the second that f—, no, Hiashi-sama will call her off active duty to have children in as few as five years—but she won’t have to deal with clan head politics. She won’t have to deal with all the power that comes with inheriting the top position in the clan. For that she is grateful.

Heihachiro-sama begins to activate the seal. He brings his hands together and Hinata watches him make an odd hand seal, one in which he cups his hands and places his thumbs together as though he’s going to whistle. He does. It takes him a few seconds of finding the right spot, but eventually a note comes through, sounding like the wooden flute Hinata’s uncle used to play before he died.

Hinata activates her Byakugan as she’s been told to do—or else the binding won’t take as well, Goro-sama had said to her earlier today—and sees the chakra swimming into Heihachiro-sama’s hands through the points on his mouth. She sees the stone slab under her back. She sees the elders holding her down. She sees the sky past them, fingers of blue dripping into her wide white eyes.

What is pain?

Hinata had thought she’d known. Pain is letting a kunai fly out of your hand the wrong way. Pain is landing on your ankle wrong and feeling it snap underneath your weight. Pain is her father slamming his fingers _whap-whap-whap_ all across her body during training and shutting off her tenketsu points. Pain is Neji ignoring her no matter how friendly she tries to be, no matter how much she tries to remind him of the old days when they used to be friends, real cousins, more than just a Branch House member and a Main House member. Pain is a little sister looking at you with disdain in her eyes. Right?

Wrong. Pain is the cursed seal activating on her forehead and digging its roots deep into her brain and her eyes. It is lightning-strikes of hurt driving themselves deep into her skull where her brain is. Pain is spinning metal points wedging deeper and deeper into her eye sockets. She screams. It’s ugly. Maybe Hiashi-sama would have liked to be her screams to be delicate or worthy of someone with the Hyūga name. This scream is high and piercing and rips her throat up in its desperation to escape.

She is nothing. The world shines bright around her and her forehead is the only thing in existence, a dark spot of pain against a sunlit background. It’s humiliating. Nobody is watching the ceremony because nobody wants to see the girl who could have grown into the clan head like this but she feels as though there are eyes on her.

Hinata’s lungs heave. She can breathe at least, breathe through the pain. She used to breathe through the pain of her father’s blows even if breathing hurt more than the actual training. Her scream tapers off into a pathetic moan and her fingers curl with the effort. It is every headache she’s ever had put together and multiplied by five hundred. Hinata is a good Hyūga born to the main branch, but good Hyūga don’t have things like this happen to them. Hinata breathes and her lungs come into existence, the steady pumping of oxygen through her veins, a rush of blood to the head. It doesn’t help much at first. It’s a struggle in and of itself and the pain goes on and rages at her but eventually she finds the breathing to be a distraction. She focuses on her lungs expanding, her chest rising, and then her lungs falling, air rushing out of her nose and mouth.

Needles piercing through bone. An axe cracking open her skull underneath the mark. Fire licking at her skin, an iron-hot tongue.

Hinata breathes in . . . out . . . in . . . out . . . until the rest of her comes into existence, and then the world around her, and then she opens the eyes she didn’t know she’d even closed. Hinata can see almost everything around her with the Byakugan and that still holds true, except her blind spot is a little bigger, and the usual strain that comes with using her eyes seems greater, like it’s draining more of her chakra. Hinata understands. The Main House cannot afford for the Branch House to be more powerful; it follows that the seal would not only compel them to obey but it would also hinder the Byakugan. She doesn’t like it but she will live with it.

The elders step away from her and regard her with cold apathy on their faces. Does it make a difference? She’d had a smooth, bare forehead not ten minutes ago. Has she crossed some line? Is she unworthy to be looked at now that she is officially a member of the Branch House?

“You are free to leave,” Goro-sama says tonelessly. He’s looking away from her. She doesn’t like it but she can’t say anything because now she’s a member of the Branch House and she must accept everything the Main House hands to her.

She tries to calm her breathing. She’s free to leave but her legs won’t move when she tells them to. Her eyes flutter shut and she deactivates her weakened Byakugan. She doesn’t want to see their faces when she asks for help.

“Goro-sama,” she says, and her voice cracks on the first syllable. She feels wretched from pain. Bile rises in her throat and she chokes it down. “I . . . I need help. Please.”

Heihachiro-sama clicks his tongue. “You are a member of the Branch House now. You will be expected to stand on your own two feet. By disappointing Hiashi-san, you have forfeited your right to assistance from the rest of the Main House. Goro-san, Fukuro-san, come. The sealing has gone well.”

Hinata lies there trembling with a combination of indignation, shame, and pain for half an hour before she can muster up the strength to move. She sits up slowly and picks herself up off the stone slab like she’d pick a tissue off the ground. She feels paper-thin. One good wind could rip her in two. Hinata exhales shakily. Her head hurts and so do her eyes. She’ll need to become used to her less powerful Byakugan lest she overestimate her abilities.

She knows the way to the Branch House section of the compound as well as she knows the way to the Main House section. She’d come here to play with Neji when she was younger. Maybe now that she has the cursed seal, Neji won’t hate her anymore.

It doesn’t take long for her to find the right house. Haruka, her caretaker-to-be, lives here. She walks up the rickety steps on the old-fashioned porch, lifts her hand, and rings the doorbell. She hears a thump from inside. What will Haruka be like? Will she resent Hinata for having been from the Main House? Will she refuse to take care of her even though Goro-sama had said she'd take Hinata in?

Haruka is a woman. Hinata remembers very little of her mother. She’s not familiar with how real mothers are supposed to act or talk or what they're supposed to do because she's never had one, not for any sense of the word, but she hopes Haruka can live up to the stories she’s heard in the academy.

The door cracks open and a pretty woman with a round face peeps out from behind the door. “Ah . . . hello? How may I help you, Hinata—”

She stops cold. Hinata follows her gaze. It’s trained on her forehead. She should have stopped and gotten her forehead protector first, maybe gotten her things from her bedroom, but she hadn’t been thinking straight. Hinata recoils and brushes her bangs back into place, pocketing the hairclips that had held them down on the top of her head. Her determination, that iron rod of will she’d kept inside her for as long as they’d been putting the seal on her, melts away as quickly as it had come.

“I—I’m sorry for disturbing you. Do you not know ab-about the arrangements?” she asks.

“Hinata-hime, what happened?” Haruka asks. She takes a step closer and lifts her hands as though she’s going to brush Hinata’s bangs aside, but at the last moment she holds back. Hinata bites her lip. “Is this . . . did Hiashi-sama . . . ”

“J-just Hinata now, please,” Hinata says. She feels weak under Haruka’s gaze. “Hanabi-hime is set to be the new clan h-head. Hiashi-sama said you were to take care of me and provide t-training. Did they not tell you?”

Haruka shakes her head. Her brows are furrowed and her lips are pinched together. “Hinata, are you feeling okay? Does it hurt? Come inside. You need to lie down. What were they thinking, sealing you at this age when—forgive me. I’m getting ahead of myself. Do you have any questions for me?”

Hinata allows herself to be escorted into the house, out of the entryway, and toward the living room, where Haruka gently presses her down into a soft couch.

“Will . . . will they hate me? I was a member of th-the Main House, and I lost that p-p-privilege. I wasn’t strong enough. Are they going to resent me, Haruka-san?” Hinata struggles to keep her voice steady but her throat hurts and she’s hurt, and confused, and her father never really acted like he loved her but he _must_ have, deep down somewhere in his heart—that’s what she’d thought, at least—and then he’d disowned her and put the cursed seal on her forehead and declared her a Branch House member just because her little sister had beat her up one too many times. She feels pathetic.

Haruka leaps out of the recliner she’d been sitting in and wraps her arms around Hinata. Haruka is a plump woman, warm and soft. Hinata figures she’s a civilian. That’s okay. She doesn’t think civilians are weaker or people to be looked down on, even if some of them have outdated mindsets. Hinata hugs her back. Her father—Hiashi-sama had told her physical affection was a sign of weakness. He’d said people would use it against her if they ever knew she was attached to anyone. She’s dead to her father now, though, so Hinata hugs her caretaker and buries her face in her shoulder and cries like a weak little girl.

She’s a good Hyūga. She really is. But nobody else will think so again, not after they see her with the cursed seal on her forehead.

“No, Hinata, no,” Haruka whispers. “Nobody will ever think wrongly of you, not anymore. Every single Branch House member knows how painful it is to receive the Caged Bird seal. Nobody will belittle you for the pain you suffered. The Branch House takes care of its own. You are ours now, Hinata.”

She gasps for breath. Good Hyūga don’t sob or bawl but Hinata’s getting dangerously close. She belongs. She’s Branch House now. She doesn’t feel like one yet but her forehead throbs dully with the pain of the seal and her chest aches with the pain of losing a father and a sister and gaining . . . a mother, maybe.

“I am?” she asks. Her throat hurts and her hands are clenched so tight they’re starting to become sore—her fingers must be digging painfully into Haruka’s back. She loosens them a little and Haruka pulls back, holding her an arm’s length away. Haruka’s eyes are watery too, but she’s smiling.

“Yes, you are,” Haruka says. And Hinata believes it.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! comments and kudos are greatly appreciated.
> 
> i run a server called [gama-chan party](https://discord.gg/g25p3S3). it's a server for readers and creators of naruto content. it'd be nice if someone joined... if you catch my drift.


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